ISLAND HOPPING IN
How far are you
ARCTIC NORWAY
willing to go
for the perfect campsite?
STORY & PHOTOGR APHS BY BR E N DAN LEONAR D
T
he first drop of sweat fell off
my brow and dropped onto
the pannier in my hand,
spattering on the yellow
waterproof nylon. I stepped up onto a
rock, got my balance, then climbed up
onto the next rock. The second, third,
fourth, and fifth drops rolled off my
head and hit the panniers, building
toward a cascade. A few feet behind me,
Hilary carried her panniers. I wondered
whether she was fully committed to
the mission or thought I was an idiot
for suggesting it. We were hiking all
our gear to a beach in a cove on the
west coast of Norway’s Lofoten Islands
near the end of our 10-day bike tour
— without a backpack. We’d just lock
up the bikes and carry our stuff to
the beach to camp for the night. The
website said it was “an easy hour’s walk.”
Not quite.
It’s a 590-foot climb up to the pass,
then down to the white sand abutting
the ocean on the other side. We
estimated that we were each carrying
35 or 40 pounds, mostly by the straps of
the panniers. Hilary was smart enough
to attach the shoulder straps to two of
her panniers before beginning the hike.
We would have stashed the bags at the
trailhead, but there were 40 cars parked
and too many people around. So there
we were, feeling like a couple of pack
mules, heavy loads slowly pulling our
arms from their sockets.
“Do you think you have enough
luggage?” joked a British gentleman
walking the other way.
“This is mostly beer,” I joked back.
“And ice. I don’t know if it’s worth it.”
“It’ll get lighter then,” his wife,
following behind him, said with a smile.
In Norway, thanks to something
called allemannsretten, or right to access,
travelers can camp anywhere they
want. As long as you’re 150 meters from
a building and not on cultivated land,
you’re free to set up a tent — for free
— which is a steal of a deal in a country
with a reputation for being expensive.
A longtime cultural tradition in Norway,
allemannsretten was finally made law
in 1957.
Because of this, our trip from the
city of Tromsø in northern Norway to
the fishing village of Å at the southern
terminus of roads in the Lofoten
Islands, had become a kind of game
of one-upping ourselves each evening
when it came time to find a campsite.
The next one didn’t have to be better
than the previous one, but we certainly
established a standard. Above all else,
it had to have a view — easy to come
by on the mountainous islands north
of the Arctic Circle. But sometimes
we chose aesthetic qualities over, say,
flatness, or privacy, or road noise, or
access to an obscure spot to use for a
restroom. We always felt the pressure
(self-inflicted, of course) to do our best.
Bicycle tourists are, perhaps out of
all travelers, the best at stealth camping
— finding clandestine spots to pitch
a tent for the night, leaving no trace,
Above: Kvalvika Beach in Norway’s Lofoten
Islands.
Right: Hilary Oliver sips morning coffee at
a campsite outside Valberg, on the island of
Vestvagoy.
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o c t o b e r / n o v e m b e r 2 01 5
and moving on the next morning.
Norway, because of allemannsretten
and because of its abundance of natural
beauty, is heaven for anyone who
considers themselves even a little bit of
a connoisseur of stealth camping.
On the eighth day of our quest for
the ultimate allemannsretten campsite,
I crested the saddle above Kvalvika
beach, setting my four panniers down
for a second to let blood pump back
into my fingertips. A breeze instantly
cooled my soaked T-shirt and I peered
around boulders to see a turquoise wave
rolling into a white sand beach the size
of two football fields, a U-shaped cirque
of 1,700-foot dark granite peaks ringing
it. Probably 70 people and 50 sheep
spread across it and the dunes behind
it, where half a dozen parties had
already pitched tents for the evening.
It was idyllic, but no secret. I picked up
my panniers and hurried down to claim
a site before more people came over the
pass behind me. Regardless of where we
pitched the tent, this campsite, I could
tell, would be hard to beat.
We started our ride out of Tromsø
in early July, the warmest month of
the year in this part of the country,
and nearly the driest. Our proposed
route included almost the entire
length of three of Norway’s Nasjonale
Turistveger, or National Tourist Routes:
Senja, Andøya, and Lofoten. With 300
miles of pedaling and three ferry rides,
we planned to cross nine islands all
above the Arctic Circle. That sounds
Sharing a morning snack break along the coast of Rolvsfjorden in northern Norway.
cold — but mercifully the coastal
region is warmer than other maritime
climates at the same latitude, thanks to
the warm North Atlantic Current and
the Norwegian Sea’s heat absorption
capacity and volume. July temperatures
ADVENTURECYCLING.ORG
stay between about 45 and 55 degrees
Fahrenheit.
We wanted to embrace
allemannsretten and talked about
maybe only getting one or two hotel
rooms during our 10-day trip — you
know, if it starts raining nonstop or
we really, really, really need a shower.
We pedaled out of Tromsø around
noon, riding under grey skies to the
Brensholmen-Botnhamn ferry, and
then riding into the evening, which
lasts several hours at this high latitude
in July. About 10:30 pm, we crested a
pass and descended to a fjord and —
camera in hand — noticed it had gotten
really dim. Not dark, but dim. Under
a cloudy sky, night takes on an eerie,
nuclear winter sort of illumination.
Darkness never comes — you just can’t
see that well, and neither can your
DSLR. We talked about finding a place
to sleep for the night and hoped for a
flat spot to appear on either side of the
highway. I turned my bike up a slightly
overgrown two-track road on the left,
hopped off, and started walking. A
hundred yards up, I found a flat spot
looking up at the steep granite east face
of 2,470-foot Burstinden. Still within
earshot of the occasional car passing on
the road below, it was quite nice for the
first night.
“This isn’t bad,” I said to Hilary,
25
congratulating ourselves. “A waterfall
and a big snowy peak.” We set up the
tent and I sat down, fired up the stove,
and started cooking dinner. Then the
mosquitoes began to swarm. Hilary
waved them away while I stirred a pot
of boiling water and noodles.
country. Based on this, we didn’t pack
any insect repellent, which turned out
to be a poor strategy.
Even with the mosquitoes, Campsite
#1 got 3.5 stars out of 5. Our campsite
rating system would continue to
evolve. The next night, just after 11
Hilary Oliver rides into the fishing village of Reine in Norway’s Lofoten Islands.
Thus began our criteria for the
Dream Campsite: Positive points
for good views. Positive points for a
short approach from the road and
minimal traffic noise, as well as flat
ground to set up the tent. Negative
points for wind and mosquitoes. I had
googled something along the lines of
“mosquitoes Lofoten” before we left
and found a TripAdvisor forum in
which a guy said he didn’t think the
mosquitoes were bad in this part of the
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pm, we lifted our bikes over a highway
guardrail just outside a tunnel north of
the village of Bleik, and popped up the
tent in a fairly flat spot out of the wind
with an ocean view. We watched the sun
not quite set but do what it does north
of the Arctic Circle in July: get low on
the horizon and move rightward, slowly.
This time, it cast the crags above our
campsite in a rosy glow. The road noise
was loud, but our jet lag finally caught
up with us and we slept for 13 hours.
o c t o b e r / n o v e m b e r 2 01 5
Campsite #2 got 3.5 stars, mostly for
the view, and for the moose that walked
right through our kitchen.
Here’s the thing about tailwinds
in the land of the midnight sun. You
can ride them as long as they last —
or as long as you last. We rolled into
Risøyhamn around 9:30 pm, having
ridden 35 miles, almost all of those
after 5:00 pm, stopping to take photos
of beaches, lighthouses, and sheep. It
was dim again and town was quiet as we
searched for a place to stop and have
“lunch,” a meal that began to creep later
and later into the evening, thanks to
the 24-hour daylight. We leaned our
bikes up against a leeward wall on the
town’s grocery store, which had closed
three hours earlier, and chatted about
the ghost-town feel you get when it
seems like daytime but no one’s outside
because it’s a normal hour to be in bed.
As we sat eating peanut butter and jelly
sandwiches at a picnic table, a woman
pulled up in a station wagon and spoke
to us in English.
“Do you have a place to sleep?” she
asked. “Yes, we’re camping in a tent,” we
said.
“You can camp up the road here,”
she offered, pointing. “It is flat, and
there is water.” I smiled and thanked
her but said we were going to keep
riding, which probably seemed like an
odd thing to tell someone at 10:00 pm
on a Tuesday. But there was a tailwind
pushing us. We rode another 13 miles,
searching for a dry, flat, somewhat
obscure campsite with a view as the
light got dimmer and dimmer. We
finally gave up and marched our bikes a
couple hundred feet into a hummocky
HIL ARY OLIVER
Stokmarknes to Svolvær, passage for
two people and two bicycles costs about
$110. We hopped on in Stokmarknes,
where the boat service originated in
1893 and reveled in a roof over our
heads and ceramic cups of coffee in
the café as the mountains slowly rolled
by both sides of the MS Lofoten, built
in 1964 and the oldest ship in the
Hurtigruten fleet of 12.
For our entire Norway trip, we
planned for three ferry shuttles to get
between islands, all arguably necessary,
besides the Hurtigruten, which
trimmed about 45 miles of riding. Bike
tour, emphasis on tour, I joked. All our
ferry rides were a respite from the
elements, a break from riding, a seat,
and a cup of coffee from the snack bar.
Only one — the hour-and-a-half ride
from Gryllefjord to Andenes — was
adventurous. As the huge boat carrying
50 cars pitched and rolled across the
N
ir c
le
I could see and looked back to see the
mountains across the sound on fire with
evening summer sun. It was an easy
decision.
The thing about camping on bike
Author Camp
Area
trips — anywhere — is that you get to
Enlarged
Author Route
build your dream home every night.
C
Ferry
c
i
Sure, the bathroom is a hole in the
t
Arc
ground, and the walls are drafty (or
is that just “a nice cross-breeze?”).
In the right parts of Norway,
you can say, “Well, do we want a
mountain view or an ocean view
tonight?” Or sometimes both. And
Tromsø
should the front door face the water or
Brensholmen
the snowy peaks? And you can watch
the sun set — for hours — while you
EA
Botnhamn
1
S
cook dinner at 10:15 pm. Campsite
Andenes
#4: 4.5 stars.
2
N
A voyage on the
Bleik
A
I
Hurtigruten, a fleet of
s
d
G
cruise and freight
an
E
sl
Risøyhamn
I
W
ships, from Bergen
R
to Kirkenes is not
O
3
cheap: $1,200 to
Sortland
$1,800 for six
days, including
4
on
t
meals. But if
Stokmarknes
o
you just want
6
a taste of it,
a threeSvolvær
Valberg
hour ride
8 Lofoten Henningsvær
5
through
7
narrow
9 Reine
straits
Å
10
from
f
tundra field in full view of the road,
finding only a semi-flat spot for the
tent, and perching our backpacking
stove on top of a particularly firm foothigh hummock to cook dinner, which
we ate at 1:30 in the morning. Campsite
#3: 2 stars.
Heading south from the town
of Sortland, RV 82 parallels
Sortlandssundet, a straight, deep-blue
sound with a tall, unbroken fence of
alpine peaks on the other side three
miles away, topping out on 4,140foot Møysalen, a square-topped peak
with year-round veins of snow lining
its steep faces. A brief rain shower
pinged our Gore-Tex jackets as we
pedaled south on Day Four, wondering
if we should just flag down one of the
farmers cutting hay in their small fields
tilting down to the sea and ask if we
could camp on their land tonight. We
decided that might be cheating.
After a few miles of riding, the sun
began to intermittently poke through
the clouds, washing patches of land
in evening gold. We turned up a dirt
road leading northwest — away from
the mountains — and a half-mile off
the highway saw a clearing. I jumped
the wet ditch and scrambled up a short
slope, tiptoeing through the tundra. It
was a minefield of sogginess, one step
on firm grass, the next squishing into a
spongy patch and soaking the toe of my
shoe. I walked back to the highest rise
Lo
JAMIE ROBERTSON/ ASTER GDEM IS A PRODUCT OF METI AND NASA
The author prepares breakfast at camp outside the town of Bleik.
0
ADVENTURECYCLING.ORG
0
20
25
40 mi
50 km
27
waters of the Norwegian Sea, Hilary and
I focused on the horizon and hoped to
avoid seasickness. Passengers staggered
like drunks between café tables and
railings on the deck, and I watched one
woman take a dramatic, but injury-free,
fall across the café floor all the way
into someone else’s booth. In perhaps
a dozen Norwegian ferry rides, this was
the only one I’d seen with vomit bags
hanging next to all the tables.
But the Hurtigruten was a calm ride
in a narrow sound, steep walls rising
over the boat, and at the end of the ride
we rolled our bikes down the gangway
into Svolvær for the second half of our
trip into the famous Lofoten Islands.
In the town square we met Ulke, a man
from Turkey who was hitchhiking his
way to Kirkenes to board a boat for
Svalbard. He told us about free camping
on a spit east of town, and we chatted
about the joy of allemennsretten.
Lofoten, we would discover, had a
culture of travelers exploring the
islands in small RVs, rental cars, or on
foot with a big backpack and a shopping
bag or two, thumbing rides. As bike
travelers, we were in the minority but
kin with the hitchhiking crowd sharing
a slow traveling speed and often-free
campsites.
We rode to just outside of
Henningsvær, a fishing village famous
for its classic architecture, rock
climbing, and scuba diving perched
on two tiny islands that were not
connected to the mainland by roads
until 1981. We got inventive, hopping a
guardrail to scramble down a coastline
among huge boulders above the
calm ocean water. We found a spot of
tundra grass big enough for the tent
and a dinner view of the sunset over
the water, which, again, lasted for
hours. But so did the attacks by the
mosquitoes. Campsite #5: 4.5 stars
with an asterisk. If you don’t bring bug
repellent, probably 4 stars.
Could there be a better place than
Norway to ponder what makes the best
campsite ever? There are the physical
attributes: flatness, proximity to water,
protection from wind, reasonable
cathole/bathroom possibilities, some
privacy, the view. But what about
situational aspects? Just because it
was windy or buggy when I was there
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doesn’t mean it will be every time. And
if clouds hid the mountains from view
one day, they might be totally visible in
great sunlight the next. Finding a great
campsite is an act of self-expression,
even if you’re just sniffing out a tent
spot that others have used in the past.
If there are no road signs leading you
there, it is — at least in some sense —
yours, if only for the night. Before this
trip, I had a mild fascination with the
art of finding campsites. But in Norway,
it was becoming an obsession.
Campsite #6 sat on top of a small hill
called Rasteplass, overlooking the village
of Valberg — mountains behind, wind
Nuts & Bolts Norway
MILEAGE
Our itinerary was 10 days,
including 300 miles of
cycling and three ferries.
GUIDED TOURS
Self-guided, supported
tours of the Arctic coast
and Lofoten Islands are
available through NorskeBygdeopplevelser, starting
at $1,350. (norskebygdeopplevelser.no)
BIKE RENTALS
Rent touring bicycles with
panniers from Tromsø
Outdoor, $128.50 for five
days, $19 for each day
after (+47 975 75 875;
tromsooutdoor.no)
of the trip, fly into Bodø and
take the ferry from Bodø to
Moskenes.
ACCOMMODATIONS
Hotels and rorbuer, or rustic
fishing cabins, are available
in many towns and villages
along the route.
FOR MORE INFORMATION
lofoten.info/en;
visitvesteralen.com/en
GETTING THERE
To replicate our route, fly into
Tromsø and then fly home
from Bodø (rental bikes can
be shipped back to Tromsø
Outdoor via the Hurtigruten
boat in Bodø). To ride only
the Lofoten Islands portion
rushing over the pass relentlessly. After
cooking dinner and eating in the cold
wind, I went to bed with numb feet. We
were awakened by a hiker’s dog barking
at us at 8:00 am. I can’t blame them —
the only flat and dry spot we could find
even somewhat sheltered from the wind
was 15 feet from the hiking trail and we
had pushed our bikes a half mile up to
get there. 3.5 stars.
Campsite #7: The E10, the busiest
road in Lofoten but sometimes the only
choice, rings the turquoise water of
the Flakstadpollen sound. We pedaled
south, watching our ribbon of asphalt
rise and fall under the great east face
of 3,054-foot Stjerntinden. At the south
end of the sound, it was hard to imagine
not camping underneath the view of
that mountain, so we did, in a flat spot
out of the wind on the leeward side of a
15-foot-high boulder. We set up the tent,
filtered water from the nearby pond, and
I started dinner, noticing the wind dying
down and a few gnats starting to appear.
Hilary took note of the bugs buzzing
around my lower legs. After seven days
of biking and not showering, a cloud of
insects really makes you feel like Pigpen
from Peanuts.
“Do you want to put on some pants?”
she asked as I stirred the pesto pasta.
“Nah, I think I’m fine,” I said. Gnats
are harmless, right? Two lessons: I was
not fine, I was dumb. And gnats (or
gnat-like bugs) are not always harmless.
I would spend significant time in the
final days of our trip scratching at
clusters of welts on my calves, shins,
and ankles. But that view! 4 stars
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29
Market Place
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 29
NORWAY
continued
(scratches ankle furiously).
The idea of outdoor adventure begins,
I think, when we slow down our speed
of travel and move under our own
power. We step off a plane and onto our
bicycles, or get out of our car with a big
backpack and walk into the woods, or
go climb a mountain. Our bike trip in
Norway never exceeded 37 mph, if I can
believe my bike computer, and probably
averaged 11 mph. That is, until we parked
our bikes against the guardrail at the
trailhead for Kvalvika beach, took our
panniers off, and started the long climb
over the pass. Then we slowed to 1
mph. At that speed, with sweat pouring
off my forehead and my shoulders
screaming for mercy, I began joking in
my head: “You too can bicycle tour in
Arctic Norway! Ocean views, beaches,
relaxation!”
We set up our tent on a nearly
perfectly flat patch of sheep-trimmed
grass and pointed the door straight at
the ocean lapping into the white sand
on Kvalvika beach. We took a swim in
the frigid water — for about 10 seconds
each — and debated whether we were
swimming in the Arctic Ocean or just the
Norwegian Sea (which we inconclusively
decided was part of the Arctic Ocean).
We watched the midnight sun on its
sideways path to not really setting and
stood on the beach until exactly 12:00
am when it became a soft, reddish
orange dot just above the horizon.
We would have two more campsites
after Kvalvika, spots on the fringes of
the towns of Reine and Å, both popular
with hitchhikers and touring cyclists,
both with great views, both solid fourstar spots. But Kvalvika, maybe because
of the effort we put in getting there,
or the lack of wind and mosquitoes,
or maybe because of the beach, the
friendly sheep, or the midnight sun, was
the best. 5 stars out of 5.
Denver-based writer Brendan Leonard wrote about
his tour on Adventure Cycling’s Southern Tier in
Adventure Cyclist’s April 2011 issue. For more of
his writing, visit semi-rad.com.
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